the year i stopped needing to look like i had it together

A little over three years ago, I flinched every time my phone rang.

Not the normal kind of flinch. The kind where your stomach drops before you've even looked at the screen, because for months, a ringing phone had meant something else had gone wrong. I was losing people I loved and going through an emergency surgery, both at once, and somewhere in there my body just decided that sound meant bad news. It took a long time to unlearn that.

I don't tell that story often. It doesn't fit neatly into a caption, and for a while I wasn't sure it belonged anywhere public at all. But I've been thinking about it again this week, because I keep noticing something about myself that I didn't expect: I am more confident right now, in my late thirties, than I have ever been in my life. And it has nothing to do with having more figured out.

the version I used to perform

In my twenties, confidence looked like competence. I was good at my job, good at showing up, good at being the person people could hand things to. And I made sure everyone could see that. What I didn't show was how much of it was upkeep. How much energy went into looking like I had it together, regardless of whether I actually did underneath.

There's research going around right now describing this exact pattern, the idea that high achievers get so good at overriding their own warning signs that the burnout hides in plain sight. It doesn't read as burnout. It reads as competence. Nobody questions the person who's still delivering. That was me. Capable enough that no one, including me, thought to ask if I actually wanted to keep going at that pace, or if I was just good at hiding that I didn't.

the year everything stopped being theoretical

Then came the year I actually mentioned. The losses. The surgery. The panic every time the phone rang. There was no performing my way through that one. I couldn't override it, optimize it, or manage it into something that looked fine from the outside. I just had to be inside it.

I'm not going to pretend that year taught me some clean lesson in real time. It didn't. Mostly it was just hard, for a long stretch, with no shortcut through it. But looking back now, I can see what it left behind. Proof. Not the theoretical kind, the kind where you tell yourself you're resilient because it sounds good. The kind where you know, because you have direct, lived evidence, that you can survive something you weren't sure you'd survive.

That's the actual difference between my twenties and my thirties. It was never that I became more confident in the abstract. It's that I ran out of a way to fake it, went through the real thing, and came out the other side with something my twenties self didn't have: a body of evidence.

what that actually looks like day to day

It doesn't look like waking up feeling unstoppable. Most days it's quieter than that. It looks like tighter boundaries, and being much clearer about who is actually in my inner circle. The people I let close now are the ones who make me want to be better, because I genuinely respect them, not the ones I need to impress. That's a small shift on paper. It has changed almost everything about how I move through a hard week.

It also looks like noticing things faster. I still have hard days. I still get overwhelmed. The difference is I catch it sooner now, because I've been through the version of overwhelm that actually breaks something, and I know what the early signs feel like in my own body. That's most of the work, honestly. Not eliminating the hard stretches. Just recognizing them early enough to do something about it.

how it shows up in building this

I think about that year constantly while building Open Day Collective, even though the two don't look related on the surface. Starting something new in your late thirties, alongside a full career you've already built, is its own kind of hard. There are weeks where nothing about this feels guaranteed.

But I have proof now that I didn't have in my twenties. I know what it actually takes to get through something with no clear ending in sight, because I've done it. Not the polished version. The real one, phone-ringing panic attacks and all. That's what I bring to the days ODC doesn't go the way I planned. Not blind optimism. Evidence.

Confidence was never about having it together. It's proof you survived not having it together, and it's still standing there when you need to remember what you're capable of.

If you have a season like that, the one that didn't feel like growth while you were in it but turned into proof once you were through it, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. I'm writing more on this in Sunday's letter, the difference between confident and performing, and I'd love for you to be there for it.

every day. on purpose. 🖊️